It seems we don’t learn from the past. As bandwidth opens up, developers and marketers are keen to gobble it all.. and then some.

Ever since I published my first web page in the 1990’s something that has continually been in mind are page load times.

Living in a country where connections speeds aren’t stellar, and in the places I’ve lived, often not even “good”; heavy pages have always bugged the crap out of me. I have had countless instances where I have abandoned purchases due to the issue.

In December last year, RadWare tested load time of 2,000 leading retail web sites and compared it against previous benchmark tests performed on the same set of sites, dating back to December 2010.

The result: load times have increased by 22% in just one year. Median load time for a first-time visit to a home page racked up 7.25 seconds, compared to the median of 5.94 seconds in December 2011.

There’s just so much complexity in pages these days. In December 2012, the median page contained 79 requests (including elements such as images, HTML and javascript), an increase of 8.22% from December 2011 median of 73 requests.

RadWare’s report states in December last year, the average Top 1000 web page was 1163 kB in size. Two years earlier, the average page was just 665 kB.

There’s been so much written about bloated pages – and even Google advises putting pages on a diet.

If you’re looking for reasonably easy (cheap/free) ways to improve page speed, check out my tips for reducing page load time – those are as relevant today as they were when I published them years ago.

Remember: just because someone is doesn’t have a blisteringly fast connection, it doesn’t mean they don’t have bucks to spend and many people who shop on via their handheld devices can be in this group.